October 25, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
‘The weave’ is the nightmare
The showman can’t put on a show anymore, but people still trust him to tell the truth about the “apocalyptic” harm of his economic policies.
Catherine Rampell is a columnist for the Post and a frequent CNN contributor. During a recent discussion of Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies, she literally threw up her hands in exasperation.
The former president “wants 10 percent global tariffs, which would worsen inflation,” she said on Abby Phillip’s show last week. “He wants to deport 20 million people, which would worsen inflation. … He wants to politicize the Federal Reserve, which would worsen inflation. He wants to devalue the dollar, which would worsen inflation” (my italics).
One of the Trump-aligned panelists interrupted her to ask: If these policies are that bad, why does half the country want them?
“Because we don’t talk about them!” she replied, hands flying.
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Rampell is right, as she usually is. There has not been the kind of serious and sustained debate over his economic policies, especially since they are said to fix the biggest problem plaguing voters, inflation and prices, when in fact they would almost certainly worsen them.
If polls show “half the country” in support of economic policies that will increase inflation, and thus increase prices, it’s due to the lack of a serious and sustained debate over them. If not, we would have to assume that voters who complain about the high cost of groceries want policies that would drive up those costs even more. By throwing up her hands, Rampell is saying that’s just too stupid to contemplate.
A showman no more
Donald Trump says his proposed across-the-board tariff on all imported goods would not be the same thing as a national sales tax that would hike the price of virtually everything. In fact, it would be practically the same thing. For argument’s sake, however, let’s say this is a question of trust.
So voters who trust Trump might want to know he has been “strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing,” according to a review by today’s Post of dozens of speeches and interviews. The report continued:
- “His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive” compared to past ones. Some remarks “are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.”
- Trump “jumps more abruptly between subjects and from his script to improvising, sometimes offering what sound like nonsequiturs. He occasionally mixes up words or names, and some of his sentences are meaningless or nonsensical. As he delivered more speeches in October, he has made multiple slip-ups per day. He has become more profane in public.”
- “Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president. He has never released his medical records or submitted to independent evaluation. The most detailed account of his health came in a January 2019 briefing from White House physician Ronny Jackson, who later resigned under allegations he drank on the job and mistreated subordinates.”
More damning is where Trump gets his information.
- It is “increasingly insular and self-reinforcing,” the Post reported. “He both validates and thrives on an alternative ecosystem that selects and amplifies stories to suit him, and he summarily dismisses any other reports as fake. Aides who contradict him or bring him bad news quickly lose his favor and access.”
So even if he’s wrong about tariffs, and he’s always wrong, no one would dare tell him. Even as the middle class heaved under the weight of the biggest tax hike since the 1980s, he would believe he’s right.
Even more damning than that is the Post’s implied revelation that Trump no longer has the capacity to determine entertainment value. To prevent supporters from leaving his rallies early out of boredom, his staff has urged him to keep them short. “A little discipline would help,” an unnamed adviser told the Post. This, however, was his response:
“People want a show.”
They do, but he can’t give it to them.
His fiercest critics would concede that spectacle has been his forte. Everyone could trust him, as it were, to put on a good show. It might be a torrent of lies and falsehoods, but at least it’s entertaining.
He can’t do even that anymore.
Yet we’re supposed to trust his judgment on inflationary tariffs
“The weave” is the nightmare
According to the Post’s Eduardo Porter, Trump’s plan “would become a nightmare” for everyday Americans. “Though each of these proposals alone could cause considerable damage to the economy,” Porter wrote, “together they would conjure a perfect storm of self-inflicted harm.”
- His policies would “shrink the nation’s gross domestic product by $8 trillion over a second presidency, in today’s money.”
- “That is more than a quarter of the nation’s economic output.”
- “At the end of that term, prices would be about 25 percent higher. Employment would tank. The dollar would sink.”
A UCLA economist told Porter it “could cause a depression.”
Porter said this “apocalyptic stuff” has unfortunately gotten entangled in Trump’s “rhetorical weave” so it’s been hard to see them distinctly.
But I don’t think they are separate.
The weave is the nightmare.
Or it would be if he wins.
“Trump is ducking debates and canceling interviews because of exhaustion,” Kamala Harris said during a rally this week. “And when he does speak, have you noticed he tends to ramble and generally for the life of him cannot finish a thought? He has called it ‘the weave.’
“I think we here will call it nonsense.”
She’s also calling it a national sales tax, a move that has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin. In a long post on his social media site, he said:
“I am NOT proposing a National Sales Tax, as the Democrats say in their Advertisement against me. [Democrats] know what they are saying is a blatant lie. I am proposing tariffs on other countries that take advantage of us, hardly a NST.” He went to say: “These tariffs are paid for by the abusing country, NOT THE AMERICAN CONSUMER. They do not cause inflation, and will MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN!”
That’s not how tariffs work. They are a tax, but nations don’t pay them. Importers do. Then importers pass that cost on to consumers. That’s why the Post’s Catherine Rampell threw up her hands in exasperation. A 10 percent global tariff is a 10 percent tax that would raise the cost of imported goods, like coffee and bananas and avocados, by 10 percent. And no one, not even Trump’s supporters, actually wants to pay more.
They might understand better if there were a serious and sustained debate, but there isn’t one. Instead, Trump’s supporters have to go on trust in a showman who can no longer be trusted to entertain them.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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